Putin has fallen into the trap that Biden laid for him
Scott Horton’s speech to the Libertarian Party of Utah and Mises Caucus in Salt Lake City, Utah 2/26/22
See my article
in Weekly Worker Key
issue is not Russia
It goes without saying
that socialists unreservedly condemn Russia’s brutal invasion of Ukraine, with
the terrible devastation and suffering that they have inflicted. We should have
no hesitation in calling for the immediate withdrawal of Russian troops from
Ukraine. Both the regimes in Moscow and Kiev are rotten and anti-working class.
We are in favour of working class unity between the people of both countries
not a war which lines up workers behind their ‘leaders’.
Like his fellow Zionists, Zelensky is koshering Ukraine's neo-Nazis
We should also
support, without hesitation, the anti-war protestors in Russia itself and
condemn the repression by the gangster regime that Putin represents with his
new law imposing 15 year gaol sentences on those who contradict Russian
propaganda. But what Putin is doing in Russia Zelensky is doing in Ukraine with
the banning of all independent media and now the outlawing
of 11 left-wing parties, including the Communist Party of Ukraine. Our ‘free media’ of course condemns the Russian legislation whilst failing to
mention Zelensky’s dictatorial actions whilst, at the same time, supporting
Boris Johnson giving the police powers to close down ‘noisy’ protests.
It is not however enough
to condemn Putin’s actions. We also need to understand why Russia invaded
Ukraine. Was it because Putin was hell bent on recreating a Greater Russia and
used the question of Ukraine’s potential membership of NATO as an excuse? Is it
merely a question of an inter-imperialist war as the Socialist Workers Party,
the Alliance for Workers Liberty, Anti-Capitalist Resistance and others on the imperialist
left, like Novara Media, maintain? It is easy to describe what is happening as
an inter-imperialist war because it saves people the trouble of analysing what
caused it. It also saves them from having to oppose their own ruling class.
The most precise and
succinct analysis of the causes of the war is provided by Professor John
Mearsheimer of Chicago, a bourgeois political scientist. For Mersheimer the
United States is choosing the wrong target which in his opinion is China. To
him the present strategy is simply driving Russia into the arms of the Chinese.
Mersheimer first came to prominence with an article in London Review of Books ‘The Israel Lobby’ written jointly with Stephen Walt from Harvard University, which questioned the utility to US foreign policy interests of the Israeli state.
Mearsheimer is no
socialist (though he supported Bernie Sanders). He is from what is known as the
Realist School of Political Science and is on the fringes of the US political
establishment. Unlike the policy wonks and foreign policy think tanks that
adorn the political scene in Washington. Mearsheimer prides himself on taking a
long view of American strategic interests rather than the short term approach
of the military-industrial complex and its representatives in the Democrats and
Republicans.
I recommend two talks by Mearsheimer. The first lecture was given to students at King’s College, London on February 21, three days before the war began. The second lecture was given on March 6, ten days into the war, with Ray McGovern, a former CIA analyst and Head of their Russia desk.
To understand the conflict in Ukraine today one has to go back to the talks held with Russian leaders in the wake of the collapse of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact and German reunification. James Baker, U.S. Secretary of State gave his famous “not one inch eastward” assurance about NATO expansion in his meeting with Mikhail Gorbachev on February 9, 1990. It was part of a ‘cascade of assurances’ given by Western leaders to Gorbachev and other Soviet officials throughout German unification, according to declassified U.S., Soviet, German, British and French documents in the National Security Archive at George Washington University.
The first such
assurance was given by West German Foreign Minister Hans-Dietrich Genscher on
January 31, 1990. The U.S. Embassy in Bonn informed Washington that Genscher
made clear
“that the
changes in Eastern Europe and the German unification process must not lead to
an ‘impairment of Soviet security interests.’ Therefore, NATO should rule out
an ‘expansion of its territory towards the east, i.e. moving it closer to the
Soviet borders.’”
Genscher even proposed leaving East German territory out of NATO’s military structures in a unified Germany.
The idea of special
status for the territory of the German Democratic Republic was codified in the
final German unification treaty signed on September 12, 1990. The promises
about not expanding NATO closer to the Soviet borders is written down, not in
treaties, but in memoranda of conversation between the Soviets and Western leaders
(Genscher, Kohl, Baker, Gates, Bush, Mitterrand, Thatcher, Major, Woerner, and
others) offering assurances throughout 1990 and into 1991 about protecting
Soviet security interests and including the USSR in new European security
structures.
Not once, but three
times, Baker
gave a pledge of “not one inch eastward” in his meeting with Gorbachev in the
February 9, 1990, meeting. He agreed with Gorbachev’s statement in reply that “NATO expansion is unacceptable.” Baker reported his conversation to Helmut Kohl, the German leader
And then I put the following question to him [Gorbachev]. Would you prefer to see a united Germany outside of NATO, independent and with no U.S. forces or would you prefer a unified Germany to be tied to NATO, with assurances that NATO’s jurisdiction would not shift one inch eastward from its present position?
As late as March 1991,
according to the diary of the British ambassador to Moscow, John Major
personally assured Gorbachev,
We are not talking about the strengthening of NATO.” Subsequently, when Soviet defense minister Marshal Dmitri Yazov asked Major about East European leaders’ interest in NATO membership, the British leader responded, “Nothing of the sort will happen.
There can be no doubt
whatsoever of the promises made at the time of the dissolution of the Warsaw
Pact and nor can there be any doubt about the fact that these promises were
broken under first Clinton, then Bush and Obama.
Yet despite these promises the Czech Republic, Poland and Hungary joined NATO in 1999 followed by Bulgaria, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia and the Baltic Republics in 2004. In 2009 Albania and Croatia followed suit and in 2017 Montenegro joined. The last member to join was North Macedonia in 2020.
Not for nothing was
Britain, at the height of the British Empire, known as ‘Perfidious Albion’. The
same could be said of the major western powers. There isn’t a promise that the
imperialist powers didn’t break nor a pledge that they kept.
At the NATO Summit in
Bucharest in April 2008 a statement
was issued, over the objection of France and Germany, which
welcomed
Ukraine's and Georgia's Euro-Atlantic aspirations for membership and agreed
that these countries will become members of NATO.
For Russia this was a
step too far. It was clear that NATO’s
strategy was to surround Russia as part of the United States goal of remaining
the world’s imperialist hegemon. One of
the results of the NATO summit’s declaration was the war which broke out in
Georgia in August of that year when Russia intervened on the side of
separatists in order to carve out the state of South Ossetia.
It was becoming clear to Russia that the plan outlined by Zbigniew Brzeziński, another ‘realist’ and Jimmy Carter’s Secretary of State, in his book ‘The Grand Chessboard’, that Russia would be divided into 3 separate republics, was on NATO’s, i.e. the United States agenda.
The next milestone was in Ukraine itself in 2014. In 2010 Viktor Yakunovich was elected as President. Courted by the European Union and Russia, Yakunovich chose the latter after having initially pushed for closer relations with the EU. The IMF had played hardball and the economy was almost bankrupt.
The reaction from the United States and the EU was not long in coming. They sponsored the Maiden coup, funding the fascists of the Right Sector and other groups which they armed. Peaceful demonstrators in Maiden Square were shot, not by the Police but by armed neo-Nazi groups. The United States, on the admission of Assistant Secretary of State Victoria Nuland, had pumped in over $5 billion to ensure that Yakunovich was overthrown. Victoria Nuland was caught on tape openly interfering in the governance of Ukraine.
All of this is documented
in Oliver Stone’s documentary
Ukraine on Fire, which quite
naturally in the present propaganda war offensive has been covered with a
Youtube health warning:
The following content has been identified by the YouTube community as inappropriate or offensive to some audiences.
The advent of a new
regime in Ukraine under the corrupt Petro Poroshenko saw the abolition of Russia language rights affecting nearly half
Ukraine’s population. It also saw attacks by fascist militias on Russians in
the Donbass. It was therefore no
surprise that parts of Eastern Ukraine broke away to form the republics of Donetsk
and Luhansk, with the aid of the Russian military.
For the last 8 years there has been an undeclared war against these republics by the fascist Azov battalion, during which 14,000 people have been killed.
It was not as if the
United States had not been warned. George
Kennan, an American diplomat and an advocate of containment of the
USSR, made his own views
clear on what was likely to happen if a policy of NATO expansion took place. It would be
the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-cold-war era. Such a decision may be expected to inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion; to have an adverse effect on the development of Russian democracy; to restore the atmosphere of the cold war to East-West relations, and to impel Russian foreign policy in directions decidedly not to our liking.
Likewise the current director of the CIA, William Burns, said
in 2008 that for Russia, “Ukraine’s accession to NATO is the brightest of
all red lines.” He went on to say that:
“I have not yet found anyone who would consider
Ukraine in NATO as something other than a direct challenge to Russia’s
interests,” he said.
It is difficult to disagree with any of these prescient sentiments. But then, as Dean Acheson, Truman’s Secretary of State remarked "Mr Kennan, in my opinion, has never understood the realities of power relationships."
This is the background
and context to the present war. However as we know, the BBC and the mainstream
media always omit anything except the most immediate. They have a ‘bias against
understanding’. And just in case an alternative view might gain currency, RT
was banned by that faithful servant of the British government, Ofcom, for bias.
The BBC’s ceaseless propaganda, with its pro-American experts never presents an
alternative narrative.
It should therefore be
clear that much of the British left, by touting the idea that what is involved
is an inter-imperialist war, are really guilty of bowing before the ‘patriotic’
hysteria that is current. Instead of directing their fire at their own ruling
class and its imperialist policies they pretend that both parties are guilty.
This has a name – social chauvinism.
A cursory examination
of the facts above makes it clear that Russia’s war on Ukraine is a defensive
war borne out of the fear of encirclement. One only has to think back to the
Cuban missile crisis of 1962 when the United States threatened to use nuclear
weapons if Soviet missiles were not removed from Cuban soil. What the United
States is proposing is to site nuclear missiles on Russia’s borders.
Economically Russia ranks
11th in the world, with a total GDP of $1.65 trillion behind South
Korea. The United States has a GDP of $23 trillion.Put bluntly, because of the disastrous privatisation of its nationalised industries
and Putin’s support for the oligarchs, Russia does not have the economic
capacity to maintain a war machine like the United States. Russia has 1
overseas based in Syria compared to the United States’s 750+ bases.
We can see the
efficacy of Russia’s military machine now that it has got bogged down in the
invasion of Ukraine. The key issue today is not Russian expansion but the
expansion of the United States informal empire.
You might think that
the abolition of NATO would be a prime demand of socialists yet at the Brighton
and Hove Trades Council the SWP motion on Ukraine merely called for NATO not to
expand into Eastern Europe. Likewise they had nothing to say on the question of
sanctions, which is war by another means. The Anti-Capitalist Resistance group
actually supports sanctions and the AWL has adopted NATO as another progressive
bedfellow alongside the Zionist state of Israel.
What is most striking about the war in Ukraine is the breathtaking hypocrisy of those who solemnly condemn the invasion of a sovereign nation, invoking the UN Charter no less, but who have nothing to say about the war in Yemen where Saudi Arabia has been attacking and bombing civilians for seven years. The United Nations has estimated that 370,000 people have died as a result of the Saudi instigated war yet neither this nor the 81 executions in one day has prevented Boris Johnson going cap in hand to this feudal monarchy in his efforts to secure increased Saudi oil supplies.
And
what of ‘democratic’ Ukraine itself? Well Zelensky has closed down all
opposition media, gaoled journalists and has now suspended
11 left-wing parties including Platform for Life which has 44 seats in the Ukrainian
parliament. Indeed in the 27 years between 1991 and 2018 66 journalists have been murdered.
We
see the open arming of the neo-Nazi Azov battalion and other fascist militia by
the West, with Congress repealing
at the end of 2015 a ban on the supply of weapons to neo-Nazi militia. Although they have little support electorally the Azov battalion is integrated
into Ukraine’s National Guard. There are now reports that Zelensky is seeking
to appoint Serhiy Sternenko as head of Ukraine’s Security Service (SBU) in
Odessa, in an attempt to further his alliance with neo-Nazi forces. As the
former head of the neo-Nazi Right Sector in Odessa, Sternenko was directly
implicated in the 2014
Trade Unions House massacre of 46 people who were burned
alive when the fascists set fire to the building. These are the West’s allies today.
Tony
Greenstein
Also
see:
The CIA May Be Breeding
Nazi Terror in Ukraine
Vigilante punishment spreads in Ukraine
Was
bombing of Mariupol theater staged by Ukrainian Azov extremists to trigger NATO
intervention?
Ukrainian
President Zelensky deepens alliance with far right
The History Behind the Russia-Ukraine War
